The Emperor of Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

shreds
and blood. Another fleeing patient tried to take cover in the back seat of one
of the two black limousines that had pulled up alongside the lorries and
trailers, beside which a handful of German officers had been standing for some
time, impassively observing the tumultuous scene. The escapee was just
attempting to crawl in through the back door of the car when its chauffeur
alerted SS-Hauptscharführer Günther Fuchs to the presence of the intruder. With
a gloved hand, Fuchs dragged the wildly resisting man out of the car and then
shot him, first through the chest and then again – when the man was already
prone – through the head and neck. Two uniformed guards immediately rushed over,
grabbed the man’s arms and threw the body, still bleeding from the head, up onto
the trailer, where a hundred or patients already stood crushed together.
    While all this was happening, the
Chairman, calm and composed, had gone up to the officer in charge of the
operation, a certain SS-Hauptscharführer Konrad Mühlhaus, and asked to be given
access to the hospital building. Mühlhaus had refused, saying this was a Sonderaktion led by the Gestapo, and no Jews were
allowed to cross the police line. The Chairman had then asked for access to the
office to make an urgent telephone call. When this request, too, was turned
down, the Chairman is supposed to have said:
    You can shoot or
deport me. But as Eldest of the Jews, I still have some influence over the
Jews in the ghetto. If you want this operation to run in a smooth and
dignified way, you would be wise to grant my request.
    The Chairman was gone for scarcely
thirty minutes. In that space of time, the Gestapo brought up more tractors and
trailers, and an extra handful of Rozenblat’s men were ordered to the hospital
gardens, to find any patients who had tried to escape out of the back entrance.
Those patients who had been hiding in the hospital grounds all this time were
felled with blows from batons or rifle butts; those who had strayed out into the
road were cold-bloodedly shot by the German guards. At regular intervals,
screams and stifled cries could be heard from the cluster of relatives outside
the hospital grounds, who were powerless to help the infirm as they were led one
by one from the hospital building. Meanwhile, more and more eyes turned to the
upstairs windows of the hospital, where people expected to see the Chairman’s
white-haired head appear, to announce that the operation had been suspended,
that it had all been the result of some misunderstanding, that he had spoken to
the authorities and all the sick and the old were now free to return home.
    But when the Chairman reappeared at the
main entrance after those thirty minutes, he did not even glance at the column
of loaded trailers. He just walked briskly back to his horse and carriage and
got in, and they set off back towards Bałuty Square.
    That day – the first of the September
operation – a total of 674 in-patients from the ghetto’s six hospitals were
taken to assembly points around the ghetto, and then onward out of the ghetto by
train. Among those expelled were Regina Rumkowska’s two aunts, Lovisa and
Bettina, and possibly also Regina’s beloved brother, Mr Benjamin Wajnberger.
    There were many who wondered afterwards
why the Chairman had done nothing to help his own relations, in spite of the
fact that everyone had seen him standing outside the hospital talking first to
SS-Hauptscharführer Mühlhaus, then to SS-Hauptsturmführer Fuchs.
    Some thought they knew the reason for
his compliance. In the course of the brief telephone conversation Rumkowski
later had from inside the hospital with ghetto administrator Hans Biebow, he was
allegedly given a promise. In exchange for agreeing to let all the old and sick
people of the ghetto go, the Chairman would be allowed to compile a personal
list from among those on the expulsion list, a list of two hundred fit and able-bodied men , men indispensable to the